The feeding of livestock and animals by farmers or ranchers requires significant manpower and leads to a significant amount of waste. More particularly, the feeding of livestock with hay bales results in considerable waste. For example, feeding cattle and horses tend to break up individual hay bales in order to pick selected parts of the hay from the bale. In the process, portions of the bale drop to the ground where they are trampled into the soil and are not eaten by the animals. As a result, ranchers need to provide more hay bales to feed a designated amount of animals which increases the work necessary to feed such animals. Attempts have been made to use feed racks and dispensing feed bins to solve this problem.
Feed racks have been known for feeding livestock. U.S. Pat. Nos. 247,346 and 5,000,122 provide two typical examples of feed racks that dispense hay to livestock, such as horses. However, each of these feed racks has an open top portion that enables an animal to retrieve feed material in an un-metered manner which will still lead to feed material being dropped onto the ground where it is wasted.
Dispensing feed racks and bins are also known. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,394,832; 6,481,373; and 7,204,201 provide examples of fed racks and bins that meter delivery of feed material to an animal. However, these racks and bins either are not capable of dispensing bales of hay, require tactile manipulation of a feed stopper mechanism, or require the use of a timing or control mechanism to meter delivery of feed material to an animal. Such constructions complicate the design and operation of the device, as well as increase the costs and complexity of managing delivery of feed material to animals.
Accordingly, improvements are needed in the design and implementation of animal feeders to maximize ingestion of feed material by an animal using the animal feeder and minimize waste of such material which might otherwise be dropped onto the ground.